Tuesday, March 21, 2006

81. When One Has Lived A Long Time Alone - Galway Kinnell

Galway Kinnell - When One Has Lived a Long Time Alone

1

When one has lived a long time aloneone refrains from swatting the flyand lets him go, and one hesitates to strikethe mosquito, though more than willing go slapthe flesh under her, and one lifts the toadfrom the pit too deep for him to hop out ofand carries him to the grass, without mindingthe toxic urine he slicks his body with,and one envelops, in a towel, the swiftwho fell down the chimney and knocks herselfagainst the window glass and releases her outsideand watches her fly free, a life line flung at reality,when one has lived a long time alone.

2

When one has lived a long time alone,one grabs the snake behind the headand holds him until he stops trying to stickthe orange tongue, which splits at the endinto two black filaments and jumps outlike a fire-eater's belches and has littlein common with the pimpled pink lump that shapessounds and sleeps inside the human mouth,into one's flesh, and clamps it between his jaws,letting the gaudy tips show, as children dowhen concentrating, and as very likelyone down oneself, without knowing it,when one has lived a long time alone.

3

When one has lived a long time alone,among regrets so immense the past occupiesnearly all the room there is in consciousness,one notices in the snake's eyes, which look backwithout paying less attention to the future,the first coating of the opaque milky-blueleucoma snakes to get when about to throwtheir skins and become new––meanwhile continuing,of course, to grow old––the exact bleu passéthat discolors the corneas of the blue-eyedwhen they lie back at last and look for heaven,a blurring one can see means they will never find it,when one has lived a long time alone.

4

When one has lived a long time alone,one holds the snake near a loudspeaker disgorginggorgeous sound and watches him crookhis forepart into four right anglesas though trying to slow down the musicflowing through him, in order to absorb itthe milk of paradise into the flesh,and now a glimmering appears at his mouth,such a drop of intense fluid as, among humans,could form after long exiting at the tipof the the penis, and as he straightens himself outhe has the pathos one finds in the penis,when one has loved a long time alone.

5

When one has lived a long time alone,one can fall to poring upon a creature,contrasting its eternity's-face to one's ownfull of hours, taking note of each difference,exaggerating it, making it everything,until the other is utterly other, and then,with hard effort, possibly with tongue sticking out,going back over each one once againand cancelling it, seeing nothing nowbut likeness, until . . . half an hour laterone starts awake, taken aback at how eagerlyone swoons into the happiness of kinship,when one has lived a long time alone.

6

When one has lived a long time aloneand listens at morning to mourning dovessound their kyrie eleison, or the small thingspiritualizing onto one's shoulder cry "pewit-phoebe!"or peabody-sparrows at midday send schoolboys'whistlings across the field, or at dusk, undamped,unforgiving clinks, as from stonemasons' chisels,or on trees' backs tree frogs scratch the thighs'needfire awake, or from the frog pond pond frogsraise their ave verum corpus—listens to thosewho hop or fly call down upon us the mercyof other tongues—one hears them as inner voices,when one has lived a long time alone.

7

When one has lived a long time alone,one knows only consciousness consummates,and as the conscious one among these othersuttering compulsory cries of being here—the least flycatcher witching up "che-bec,"or redheaded woodpecker clanging out hismusic from a metal drainpipe, or ruffed grousedrumming "thump thrump thrump thrump-thrump-thrump-thrump-rup-rup-rup-rup-rup-r-r-r-r-r-r"through the treees, all of them in time'sunfolding trying to cry themselves into self-knowing—one knows one is here to hear them into shining,when one has lived a long time alone.

8When one has loved a long time alone,one likes alike the pig, who brooks no defermentof gratification, and the porcupine, or thorned pig,who enters the cellar but not the house itselfbecause of eating down the cellar stairs on the way up,and one likes the worm, who by bunching herself togetherand expanding rubs her way through the ground,no less than the butterfly, who totters full of worryamong the day-lilies, as they darken,and more and more one finds one likesany other species better than one's own,which has gone amok, making one self-estranged,when one has lived a long time alone.

9

When one has lived a long time alone,sour, misanthropic, one fits to one's defiancethe satanic boast—It is better to reignin hell than to submit on earth—and forgets one's kind, as does the snake,who has stopped trying to escape and movesat ease across one's body, slumping into its contours,adopting its temperature, and abandons hopeof the sweetness of friendship or love—before long can barely remember what they are—and covets the stillness in organic matter,in a self-dissolution one may not know how to halt,when one has lived a long time alone.

10

When one has loved a long time alone,and the hermit thrush calls and there is an answer,and the bullfrog, head half out of water, remembersthe exact sexual cantillations of his first spring,and the snake slides over the threshold and disappearsamong the stones, one sees they all liveto mate with their kind, and one knows,after a long time of solitude, after the many steps takenaway from one's kind, toward the kingdom of strangers,the hard prayer inside one's own singingis to come back, if one can, to one's own,a world almost lost, in the exile that deepens,when one has lived a long time alone.

11

When one has lived a long time alone,one wants to live again among men and women,to return to that place where one's ties with the humanbroke, where the disquiet of death and nowalso of history glimmers its firelight on faces,where the gaze of the new baby looks past the gazeof the great-granny, and where lovers speak,on lips blowsy from kissing, that languagethe same in each mouth, and like birds at daybreakblether the song that is both earth's and heaven's,until the sun has risen, and they standin a light of being united: kingdom come,when one has lived a long time alone.